Operative criticism and historical criticism in Manfredo Tafuri

The work of the Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri in the context of the history and criticism of modern architecture is vast, standing out, above all, for the radicalism with which it approaches the current cycle whose first systematization emerges with the publication of Teorie e Storia dell’Architettura in 1968. This book introduces issues that will become central in the following years, such as the revision of the Modern Movement and the relationship between ideology and architecture, within which the problematic relationship between history and criticism becomes relevant. The opposition to the “operative” criticism and the deficiencies pointed out to the “historian architects” committed to the causes of architecture are scrutinized in this work and refer to a famous polemic that began years earlier regarding an exhibition dedicated to the work of Michelangelo. Tafuri accused Bruno Zevi and Paolo Portoguesi, commissioners of the show, of practicing “militant criticism” and distorting history, framing, and shaping it to conform to their professional agendas. To avoid this type of conflict of interest, he proposes the abandonment of historical research by architects related to the professional practice and defends history as a critical instrument. Today, when the notion of “objective reality” underlying Teorie e Storia can no longer be sustained before the theoretical precepts of post-structuralism, as Tafuri himself came to recognize later, but the value of reliable information is discussed again, this article revisits the Italian historian’s warnings of the dangers of “operative” criticism that led him to review methods and practices of traditional historiography, still dominant in the second half of the 1960s, exerting a profound influence on the architectural debates that occurred in the following decade in Europe and the United States.